Category Archives: What I’m thinking about

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs, What I'm Making, What I'm thinking about

Lived Experience is Representation

A salute to our first woman Vice President, Kamala Harris, commemorating her inauguration in January 2021

Available as a digital original print, 11 x 14, by Leda Black, Creatrix. You can order at this link.

The image shows a fist holding keys as a weapon and represents the violence women have been taught to prepare themselves for. It is combined with a drawing of the official seal of the office of Vice President showing an eagle gripping vegetation in one claw and arrows in the other.
The Female Power Project salutes our first woman Vice President

The print says: Lived Experience is Representation. “at some point in Kamala Harris’s life, someone has instructed her to carry her keys like a weapon” (quote by Monica Hesse in the Washington Post, October 29, 2020). The Female Power Project Salutes Kamala Devi Harris. First woman Vice President of the United States of America. Taking her oath on January 20, 2021 in Washington, DC.

The election of a woman Vice President is a historic occasion, and one that must absolutely be commemorated by the Female Power Project. It is especially interesting when we remember that voting rights for women were not protected in our constitution until the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920, 100 years before the election that brings Kamala Harris to the office of Vice President of the United States of America. (100 is a nice round number, and thus satisfying, but I think it has taken an insanely long time to achieve this.) Although women won the vote in 1920, after over 70 years of organized protest and struggle, it took another 45 years for the votes of black women to be protected by law, through the Voting Rights Act. So it is especially compelling—and must be emphasized—that our first woman vice president is also a woman of color.

Since I started the perSISTERS series in 2017, I have created three designs for Kamala Harris: INSIST; QUESTION; and I’M SPEAKING. This one you are reading about is the fourth.

Kamala Devi Harris (born October 20, 1964) was the junior Senator from California and is now the new Vice President. Before she was a Senator, she served as Attorney General of California. Harris was born in Oakland, California. She is the daughter of an Indian mother—a cancer researcher who emigrated in 1960—and a Jamaican-American father who is an economics professor. (based on Wikipedia)

DESIGN NOTE
When I was coming up (and Harris is about my age) the constant fear of being a target of violence was truly represented by this fist of keys, and it works as a graphic statement. When walking to your car, when walking home from the bus stop, hold your keys so that you can use them as a weapon to defend yourself when attacked by strangers sneaking up on you. However, having a young woman as a daughter, I’ve learned the current predation technique is adding a drug to her drink when she is out dancing and having fun in crowds. It is on her mind every time she goes out. (Back when we could gather together in crowds.) The drug causes a woman to pass out, and then the predator rapes her. This is violence, even if the targeted human is completely inert and there is neither struggle nor physical effort. Obviously, a doped bar glass is not an effective image for this salute, so I have added this note to elaborate on how devastating the experience represented by the fist really is. Rape culture teaches us that this is just the way things are. But we will change the way things are. This lived experience has to inform the decisions of our women leaders, and now we have someone at the executive level who knows, really knows, what this means.

Copyright Leda Black, December 2020

Leda Black,
Creatrix at Female Power Project

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ORGANIZE honors Dolores Huerta

Dolores Huerta perSISTERS Feminist Art #FemalePowerProject
ORGANIZE — #FemalePowerProject perSISTERS poster honoring Dolores Huerta

Dolores Huerta is profoundly gifted with the skills of listening, speaking, inspiring, and negotiating. These, along with courage, persistence, dedication to non-violence—and fed by her love of people—make her one of the most successful community organizers ever. I didn’t think organizing could be such an amazing thing until I started researching Dolores Huerta. I can only sketch in some details about this amazing woman here. I urge everyone to watch a recent documentary about her called “Dolores” (2018). I have started with some quotes of Huerta’s, then sketched out some of her history. I have pasted some links to my sources below.

To begin, you should understand that the migrant farm workers in the US around 1960 were subject to deplorable and shocking living and working conditions.
Dolores Huerta on organizing:
“It is rarely practiced today because it is tedious and time consuming. However, the results are long lasting and while people are in the process of building organization, they are learning lessons they will never forget and the transformative roots are planted. The fruit is the leadership that is developed and the permanent changes in the community. In other words, this is how grass roots democracy works.”

“…giving them the confidence they needed through inspiration and hard work. Educating them for months to realize that no one was going to win their battle for them. That their conditions could be changed by only one group of people, themselves.”

Huerta’s first occupation was as a teacher in California: “I couldn’t tolerate seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes. I thought I could do more by organizing farm workers than by trying to teach their hungry children.”

From the documentary film: “I used to think it was wrong to take credit for the work that I did. But I don’t feel that way any more.”

Dolores Huerta on learning about the history and dignity of your own people (this is in the context of Arizona eliminating ethnic studies in the schools and erasing Dolores Huerta from their history curriculum): “All that a person has is their story. If you deny their story you take away their power.” (Of course this resonates with me and my work!)

Dolores Clara Fernández Huerta (born April 10, 1930, in New Mexico) is a Mexican-American labor leader and civil rights activist who, with Cesar Chavez, was the co-founder of the National Farmworkers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers (UFW). Huerta helped organize the Delano grape strike in 1965 in California. In 1966, Huerta and her fellow organizers led a 300-mile march from Delano to the state capitol in Sacramento to focus media attention on the strike. In 1966, she negotiated a contract between the UFWOC and Schenley Wine Company, marking the first time that farm workers were able to effectively bargain with an agricultural enterprise. But what made the largest impact was the nationwide grape boycott, which Huerta went to New York to organize there. While in New York, Huerta worked with feminists like Gloria Steinem, and they influenced each other greatly. Huerta embraced feminism, and Steinem realized that the women’s movement should try harder to include people of color. The grape boycott was successful. The entire California table grape industry signed a three-year collective bargaining agreement with the United Farm Workers in 1970. Furthermore, in 1975 the California Labor Relations Act was signed, the first law in the country that recognized the right of farm worker unions to negotiate contracts with the agricultural industry.  Huerta originated the rallying cry, “Sí, se puede” which she and Cesar Chavez used during a 25-day fast in Phoenix, Arizona, trying to organize farm workers to demand fair wages and better working conditions. It means, “Yes, it can be done.” Huerta created the phrase because people kept telling her, no, you can’t do that, it is not done: “No se puede.” But two negatives make a positive, and saying “no” to a no, means saying “Yes,” yes, it can be done. And she did it. Over the years, “Sí se puede” has also been adopted by other civil and labor rights groups involving Latinos around the country. It was adopted also by Senator Obama during his presidential campaign. In 2012, President Obama awarded Huerta with the highest civilian award in the United States, The Presidential Medal of Freedom. Upon receiving this award Huerta said, “The freedom of association means that people can come together in organization to fight for solutions to the problems they confront in their communities. The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized, and took direct action. It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today. The civil rights movement, the labor movement, the women’s movement, and the equality movement for our LGBT brothers and sisters are all manifestations of these rights. I thank President Obama for raising the importance of organizing to the highest level of merit and honor.”The Female Power Project supports causes that resonate with the stories of the females featured. Using her unrestricted gift of $100,000 from the Puffin Foundation, Huerta started a foundation to train people to do community organizing. I urge everyone to support The Dolores C. Huerta Foundation (as I have).  http://doloreshuerta.org/

SOURCES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolores_Huerta
http://doloreshuerta.org/dolores-huerta/
http://eloquentwoman.blogspot.com/2015/09/famous-speech-friday-dolores-huerta-at.html
https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2017/03/09/nfwa-march-and-rally-april-10-1966/
https://libraries.ucsd.edu/farmworkermovement/media/oral_history/ParadigmArchive/arc%2029.pdf
https://www.aarp.org/politics-society/history/info-2004/interview_dolores_hurerta.html
https://www.amazon.com/Dolores-Huerta/dp/B07F5FXP71/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1535663112&sr=8-2&keywords=dolores+huerta
https://insider.si.edu/2018/04/dolores-huerta-a-latina-civil-rights-icon/

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Fannie Lou Hamer: Be inconvenient

Fannie Lou Hamer Feminist Art Feminist Graphics Protest Art Resistance Art Womanist
Be inconvenient — #FemalePowerProject perSISTERS poster honoring Fannie Lou Hamer

I’m not saying I’m finished with this new perSISTER design for the Female Power Project. But I will post updates if I change it. Regardless, Fannie Lou Hamer’s story will remain the same. Here goes:

Fannie Lou Hamer (October 6, 1917–March 14, 1977)

It was inconvenient to the racist white establishment of Mississippi when Hamer decided, at the age of 45, that she wanted to register to vote. She was prevented by an arbitrary literacy test and then fired by her boss (“we’re not ready for that in Mississippi”) and kicked out of her house and shot at by white supremacists. She failed the test a second time. On the third time she passed, but when she went to vote she was told she needed to have two poll tax receipts. She eventually did pay for the receipts and it was inconvenient that she finally did vote. The Voting Rights Act was passed to prevent such voter suppression. (See RBG)

It was inconvenient that Hamer had no sense. “I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared—but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.” (This fearlessness reminds me of Harriet Tubman’s)

It was inconvenient that Hamer had returned to Mississippi after attending a pro-citizenship conference in South Carolina. She was arrested and it took her a month to not-fully recover from the beating the police gave her. It was inconvenient that she never recovered because it proved the brutality of the white people in power there.

It was inconvenient that Hamer was so gifted at organizing voter registration drives like the Freedom Summer.

It was inconvenient that Hamer was so good at hosting and nurturing activists of all colors.

It was inconvenient that Hamer could quote a Bible passage to support every social justice initiative she embraced.

It was inconvenient when Hamer co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to contest the legitimacy of the all-white “official delegation” to the 1964 Democratic convention from that state. It was so inconvenient that President Lyndon Johnson had to interrupt the broadcast of her testimony to the credentials committee. He was afraid of it looking like the “Negroes” were taking over the Democratic party platform, and that too many scared white people would vote Republican. (Sound familiar?) After this election the racial alignment of the parties did shift, starting in the South.

In 1971 it was inconvenient that Hamer co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, created “to increase the number of women in all aspects of political life—as elected and appointed officials, as judges in state and federal courts, and as delegates to national conventions.”

More than anything else, it was inconvenient that Hamer told her story so eloquently, authentically, and clearly. It was inconvenient that people couldn’t ignore her words. “…but if I can’t tell the truth—just tell me to sit down—because I have to tell it like it is.”

At her funeral service in 1977 Andrew Young said, “None of us would be where we are today had she not been here then.”

Here are my sources and some really great resources:
Film, “This Little Light of Mine, The Legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer” https://www.fannielou.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Lou_Hamer
http://www.crmvet.org/docs/flh64.htm
https://timeline.com/hamer-speech-voting-rights-d5f6ddc7470a
This is a very interesting text laying out the racial politics in the US during the 1964 election. It has everything to do with what we are seeing now:
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/spring/lbj-and-white-backlash-1.html